मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण"

समर्थ शिष्या अक्का : "स्वामीच्या कृपाप्रसादे हे सर्व नश्वर आहे असे समजले. पण या नश्वरात तमाशा बहुत आहे."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

C. P. Cavafy: "I’d rather look at things than speak about them."

Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”

सदानंद रेगे: "... पण तुकारामाची गाथा ज्या धुंदीनं आजपर्यंत वाचली जात होती ती धुंदी माझ्याकडे नाहीय. ती मला येऊच शकत नाही याचं कारण स्वभावतःच मी नास्तिक आहे."

".. त्यामुळं आपण त्या दारिद्र्याच्या अनुभवापलीकडे जाऊच शकत नाही. तुम्ही जर अलीकडची सगळी पुस्तके पाहिलीत...तर त्यांच्यामध्ये त्याच्याखेरीज दुसरं काही नाहीच आहे. म्हणजे माणसांच्या नात्यानात्यांतील जी सूक्ष्मता आहे ती क्वचित चितारलेली तुम्हाला दिसेल. कारण हा जो अनुभव आहे... आपले जे अनुभव आहेत ते ढोबळ प्रकारचे आहेत....."

Kenneth Goldsmith: "In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”1 I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours."

Tom Wolfe: "The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is ‘First, do no harm.’ And I think for the writers it would be: ‘First, entertain.’"

विलास सारंग: "… . . 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Saturday, March 16, 2013

Empower the the Election Commission to Ban the Nonelected Expression!

SIMON CRITCHLEY:

"...When asked by Lysias the pharmacist if he believed in the gods, Diogenes the Cynic  replied, “How can I help believing in them when I see a god-forsaken wretch like you?” When he was asked what was the right time to marry, he said, “For a young man not yet, for an old man never at all.” When asked what was the most beautiful thing in the world, Diogenes replied, “Freedom of speech.” Sadly, it remains one of the most dangerous..."





Almost all the political parties in India are against some expression or the other-   by artists or ordinary citizens like me, who are nobody. Artists get police protection and media attention. I am left to fend for myself.

The expressions include cartoons, paintings, books, plays, speeches, thoughts, cinema, blog-post, FB post, Twitter post...

Wikipedia informs:

"Political parties that wish to contest local, state or national elections are required to be registered by the Election Commission of India (EC). In order to gain recognition in a state, the party must have had political activity for at least five continuous years, and send at least 4% of the state's quota to the Lok Sabha (India's Lower house), or 3.33% of members to that Legislative Assembly of that state..."

If so, why not empower the EC of India to ban any expression that is not acceptable to even one political party.

That is, we can have a transparent online process where a recognized political party raises an objection to a particular expression...TV channels get the live feed of that...They start running the story if it's TRP- worthy...Democracy at its best....political parties represent people....elections and media are the backbones of any democracy...the EC gets the final vote on the subject..

Jonathan Jones writes on his Art Blog in The Guardian 'Dirty old masters: should the EU ban pornographic paintings?':

"...Europe's greatest art has long been an aid to, and celebration of, sexual fantasy. Will a ban on porn affect our art heritage?...Europe's great artists were making pornography long before the invention of the camera, let alone the internet. In my new book The Loves of the Artists, I argue that sexual gratification – of both the viewers of art, and artists themselves – was a fundamental drive of high European culture in the age of the old masters. Paintings were used as sexual stimuli, as visual lovers' guides, as aids to fantasy. This was considered one of the most serious uses of art by no less a thinker than Leonardo da Vinci, who claimed images are better than words because pictures can directly arouse the senses. He was proud that he once painted a Madonna so sexy the owner asked for all its religious trappings to be removed, out of shame for the inappropriate lust it inspired. His painting of St John the Baptist is similarly ambiguous...."


Venus of Urbino by Titian

The Venus of Urbino by Titian.

Photograph: Nicola Lorusso/Alinari Archives/Corbis , The Guardian

Many Indians were/are  well familiar with the sentiments expressed above:

"Paintings were used as sexual stimuli, as visual lovers' guides, as aids to fantasy. This was considered one of the most serious uses of art by no less a thinker than Leonardo da Vinci, who claimed images are better than words because pictures can directly arouse the senses."

I fell ill in Kolkata in 1991 supposedly by amebiosis...its water they said, its weather some others. Some advised to go to "the West" for change of water and weather.

We went to  Khajuraho coinciding with the annual dance festival there

But the flesh and blood were no match for the stone. Not only I was cured in a dayI was massively turned on by what I saw on the temple walls there. I was back...(I won't go further than this to protect my wife's privacy.)

Today,  as I suffer from high blood pressure, I wonder where I should go to "snap out of it"! Khajuraho does not sound right but who knows!


'A temple relief at Khajuraho features a couple in a sexual embrace with a man and a woman masturbating to either side.'

courtesy: Wikipedia and Mr. Henry Flower